tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 19 17:30:50 1993
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Re: Daily Musings
>From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
>To: "Klingon Language List" <[email protected]>
>Date: Tue, 19 Oct 93 18:43:08 EDT
>Subject: Re: Daily Musings
>> cha'leS ghuntaHghachHolpaQDI'norghvaD chov vIchaj.
>>
>> Day after tomorrow I have an exam in programming languages class... :)
>
> Eeeeeeeeeeeeew! ghewmey! Your OTHER language is GERMAN, right?
Actually, yes. Three years of German in High School, didn't learn a damn
thing except maybe "Ich bin toast" (yes, that's not completely German; it's
what you get when you have a bunch of guys completely not interested in
learning German... :)
>> That huge word is my attempt to come up with a way of saying "Programming
>> Languages Class". This doesn't really fit the noun-noun construction
>> (it's not really "class' programming languages", nor is it "the programming
>> languages' class"). So does this mean I'm forced to use that unweildy
>> compound noun.
>
> Sorry. I had missed your point because I could not understand the
>Klingon sentence at all, since I could not find "chaj" anywhere in TKD and
>the loose verb "chov" didn't seem to fit the English translation. Ohhhhh! You
>meant "vIghaj"! Then, I suppose "chovghach" or "chovwI'" might have been
>better than the bare verb? This is, so far as I can tell, another case of not
>enough words in TKD, unless someone has a more inventive, graceful term?
Yeah, that was a typo... It was (obviously) supposed to be vIghaj, "to
have"... However, I think that I might be right in using "chov" by itself,
according to TKD, verbs may double for nouns. Actually, after reading the
passage in the addendum again, it seems that Okrand may have screwed us over.
He writes: It is not known if all verbs can be used as nouns, but it is
known that verbs ending in suffixes.... can never be nouns. (end quote)
But it's ambiguous as to whether or not this applies to ALL verbs, or just
those verbs that he has also listed as nouns within TKD. In retrospect,
"examination" would probably be "chovwI'". "chovghach" is more like
"examining", as in "examining things is a helpful method"...
>> Other stuff I came up with...
>>
>> Dalqu' SoQvam
>> jatlhlaHbe'chu' ghojmoHwI'vam
>
> Hmmmm. Interesting. I'm sure this is not what chu' was intended to mean.
>It's worth looking at and musing on, but I would translate this as "This
>speech is very boring. This professor is clearly not able to speak." If you
>had said, "jatlhlaHchu'be' ghojmoHwI'vam", that would have come closer to
>your meaning: "This teacher is not clearly able to speak." Then again, the
>Klingon would REALLY mean something closer to "It is not clear that this
>teacher is able to speak." The suffix chu' is intended to refer more to the
>degree of certainty of fact than to the manner in which the verb does its
>verb thing. A Klingon would probably just say, "Dalqu' ghojmoHwI'vam", or
>"QaQbe' ghojmoHwI'vam". Or even, "Dubbe'chugh ghojmoHwI'vam vIHoH".
>
> That's why Klingon classes rarely get boring. {{:)>
Actually, I wanted to say "The professor doesn't speak clearly". I had
NO idea how to express that, but it LOOKED like -chu' might be a good
prefix. Here's my reasoning (I thought about this one for a while)...
In the TKD, the examples for -chu' are jIyajchu' "I understand clearly",
and baHchu' "he/she fired perfectly". I believe you are incorrect in your
reference to -chu'; you're probably thinking of -bej, which means certainty.
Of course, they're both Type 6 suffixes, so you can't say "baHchu'bej", to
say "he/she definitely fired perfectly". Shucks.
...Paul